Developing Internal Case Studies: 5 Tips to Market LMS Value

— by taylor (2 min read)

Companies have been putting more money into their learning and development budgets. In fact, Bersin by Deloitte’s 2013 Corporate Learning Factbook shows that U.S. organizations grew their spending by 12 percent in 2012.

With all those dollars being allocated to training, are your employees taking advantage of the opportunities? It’s easy for employees to forget or even miss that there’s learning management software available to them. Courses that are relevant to their job might be hard to find, lost in a large library of titles.

Instead of sending reminders, take a marketing spin and create internal case studies of what employees learned and how the training applies to the job.

  • Find people who are your power users. Your LMS or learning content management system should track who’s using what courses or downloading additional resources.
  • Interview them about the courses they’ve been taking. Approach the power users and ask about their experience. Make sure they’re getting value from the training and would be willing to participate in a promotional case study.
  • Learn how the training has impacted their performance. Training should help employees do their jobs better, so ask how the training has made a difference. Also ask how the team’s performance might have been improved.
  • Include insight from their managers. Managers could be encouraging development, or they might not even know employees are going the extra mile to train themselves. Find out what each manager knows, including how improved performance could be changing the way those managers work toward developing the rest of their teams.
  • Capture the story. You can capture the story in any number of ways — writing an article, taping a Q&A, or even making a video. Make sure you put the story in a format that’s easy for other employees to consume when you share it with the rest of the organization.

Keep tracking use in your LMS so you can find additional power users and see which case studies might have increased usage overall. It’ll be powerful information to share with your executive team, and it can help ensure future budget increases for training.